Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as computers, cellular phones, personal computing devices, and many other applications. Home, industrial, and automotive devices that, in the past, comprised only mechanical components now have electronic parts that include semiconductor devices.
Semiconductor devices are manufactured by depositing many different types of material layers over a semiconductor workpiece or wafer, and patterning the various material layers using lithography amongst other processes. The material layers typically comprise thin films of conductive, semi-conductive, and insulating materials that are patterned and etched to form integrated circuits (ICs). There may be a plurality of transistors, memory devices, switches, conductive lines, diodes, capacitors, logic circuits, and other electronic components formed on a single die or chip.
There is a trend in the semiconductor industry towards reducing the size of features, e.g., the circuits, elements, conductive lines, and vias of semiconductor devices, to increase performance of the semiconductor devices, but also to reduce the manufacturing cost. The minimum feature size of semiconductor devices has steadily decreased over time. As features of semiconductor devices become smaller, however, it becomes more difficult to pattern the various material layers because of diffraction and other effects that occur during a lithography process. For example, key metrics such as resolution and depth of focus of the imaging systems may suffer when patterning features at small dimensions.
Innovative process solutions have been developed that overcome some of these limitations. Many such process solutions, however, also interact with subsequent steps and may degrade other equally important factors. For example, process modifications made, in the printing of minimum features during the lithography steps can seriously impact transistor performance or product yield.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.